


To Know Without Knowing

by nillial



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, M/M, One Shot, Short One Shot, and then kravitz figures out where that lich is ie the umbrastaff, just like. from kravitz pov, krav and taako go on their chug n squeeze date when lich happens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-17
Updated: 2019-07-17
Packaged: 2020-06-29 21:08:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19838530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nillial/pseuds/nillial
Summary: Kravitz has been doing this for a long time. There is, no doubt, a lich inside of the Umbrastaff.And while it’s a pretty interesting lich, it’s also, like all liches, an unsafe one. And part of Kravitz’s job description is to re-kill liches, so…He begins to reach for his scythe, and then the handle warms up, slow and then impossibly quick, until it burns. For a moment, he fears it’s charging up another spell, and then—And then he hears a whisper.-Set during Lunar Interlude IV. A story in which Kravitz figures out that there is, a fact, a lich in Taako's umbrella.





	To Know Without Knowing

The hair on Kravitz’s neck stands up. The feathers on the collar of his cloak bristle. His stomach drops, his mouth goes dry, and the air changes, just slightly and just enough to be noticed.

_It’s back._

Without thinking, he wills away his human form in favor of his reaper one. The skin melts off his face, his cloak grows longer until it’s billowing at his feet, the hair on his head lights aflame and the ash it produces morphs into feathers, but he doesn’t feel it. All he feels is _that._

“There’s something here,” he says, panic crawling into his tone. 

Beside him, laughter bubbles out of Taako’s throat. “I feel it too!”

“It was— no, not this, the— there’s something here. It was in the Miller’s lab, too, I could feel it. It’s dead, and it’s powerful, and it’s extremely close.” He turns around to face Taako, the grip on his scythe tightening. He hopes it isn’t him. “Are you harboring a dark spirit, Taako? Do you— do you have suspicions you might be some sort of vessel?”  
  
Taako, who looks largely unaffected, shrugs. “Maybe? I mean, it’s been a few years. Was that a thing for a while?” He gestures with the umbrella he’s been carrying around with him all evening. “I eat old dead dudes with my umbrella. Is that a possibility, maybe?”

The kind of power this thing is emanating is too strong to be something Taako has killed and gotten away from alive. This is something that’s been around for a while. Festering somewhere.

He drags a skeletal hand down his face. “I don’t— no, I don’t think it’s that.”

He scans the quad in a desperate attempt to pick up something. It has to be here somewhere and it has to be after him, or after Taako, or after his friends, or after all of them. Kravitz may be undead, but those three are, he _thinks_ , mortal, and he really doesn’t want to get them killed. He _just_ convinced the Raven Queen to let them go. She’ll have his ass if he shows back up in the Astral Plane with the three souls he just pardoned for the second time.

And this (hopefully?) date was going so well, too. Of course a lich had to show up. Of _course._

There’s a blast of light from behind him— a Scorching Ray shooting up towards the sky. Kravitz senses a wave of necromantic energy coming off of it, which is weird, because Scorching Ray isn’t a necromancy spell. When he follows the ray down to its source, he sees Taako, who has his umbrella pointed towards the sky.

They stare at each other for a moment. And then Kravitz says, “What was that?”

Taako lowers his umbrella. The confusion and shock on his face is too genuine for him to be lying. “The Umbrastaff’s trying to kill you, man, it’s not me!”

“What?”

Taako frantically jabs a finger at his cheap dollar store umbrella. “The Umbrastaff— check it out, I used to think it was Umb _ro_ but it’s actually Umb _ra_ — it acted on its own.”

He takes a minute just to look at the Umbrella in Taako’s hand. It really looks like he picked it up from Fantasy Dollar General five years ago and hand-painted flames on the sides. There is no way Taako killed something _that_ powerful, trapped it in _that umbrella,_ and just carries a caged entity like _that_ around with him without having died yet. 

But he’s undeniably been doing exactly that.

“I don’t understand, that’s not—” He sighs. “Can I see it?”

Taako eagerly pushes it into his hands. “Okay!”

The handle is unnaturally warm, not because Taako was holding it, but because something has just used an immense amount of power to charge up a spell and break the barrier keeping them trapped there just enough to release that spell. There’s necromantic energy in its core— so much that Kravitz is feeling a headache coming on. It could theoretically be the cumulative power of all of the “old dead dudes” the Umbrastaff absorbs, but this has to be a (very dangerous, unbelievably strong) singular entity. And they’re _stable._ They shouldn’t be stable.

Kravitz has been doing this for a long time. This is, no doubt, a lich.

And while it’s a pretty interesting lich, it’s also, like all liches, an unsafe one. And part of Kravitz’s job description is to re-kill liches, so…

He begins to reach for his scythe, and then the handle warms up, slow and then impossibly quick, until it burns. For a moment, he fears it’s charging up another spell, and then— 

And then he hears a whisper. Faint, not quite in his ear but not quite from behind him, not quite anywhere, but it’s there. They speak in Taako’s voice, but it’s not Taako’s voice. It’s a woman. It’s a woman, and she’s scared. She’s _pleading._ And she begs, just quiet enough to go unheard but just loud enough to be noticed— _“Please.”_

He waits for more, hopes for more, but nothing comes. Kravitz is left with a very warm umbrella and a lich he’s feeling weirdly sympathetic towards. 

He glances up at Taako, who’s rummaging for something in one of his ungodly number of pockets. He’s not sure what she wants with him. Maybe she’s trying to trick him. Maybe she just wants to kill Taako. Get some revenge. 

But that woman— whoever she was— didn’t sound like someone looking for vengeance. Her “please” didn’t sound like someone who was angry at her captor and angry at the world, begging him to understand why she needed to be let go. It sounded gentler. It sounded like someone using her last bit of strength to plead for mercy. And while Kravitz is somewhat used to death criminals asking for sympathy so they aren’t thrown in the Eternal Stockade— a request that he isn’t always immune to, which is why he’s here tonight— he gets the feeling that the Eternal Stockade isn’t the worst of her fears. Why, he has no idea. Kravitz is the one who's been throwing death criminals into the Stockade for God-knows-how-long and he still gets the creeps when he goes down there.

He isn’t sure how he knows all of this. It’s like she crawled into his _mind_.

Kravitz shudders.

Maybe she was just using Taako’s dialect to make Kravitz trust her, or maybe she was deliberately hiding her anger to mask her intentions, or maybe she’s just a good liar, but she was also… stable. It’s difficult for a lich to stay stable in good conditions. After spending time in an umbrella for a while, a lich’s mind should be long gone. But she isn’t. She’s still there. And that doesn’t make sense. 

He really should just pull out his scythe and send the soul inside of the Umbrastaff to the Eternal Stockade. It’d be the safest option. It’d be doing his job. 

He spares another look at Taako, who has apparently found what he was looking for (loose pudding), and then back down at the umbrella. This is Kravitz’s job, but it’s not like Kravitz always does his job correctly. He lets people gamble for their souls when he should be collecting them. He gets bored and goes down to the Stockade to pop open a bottle of wine with some souls that have stories to tell. He pardons highly-wanted death criminals twice and then goes out on what he thinks is a date with one of them. He’s found ways to get creative in a job he’s been doing for a long, long time.

This lich— she isn’t like the kind of lich that all liches eventually become. She isn’t a detachment of herself. She’s not a fragment of who she once was. She’s not a jagged shard of a shattered mind. She’s all there, and she doesn’t want to hurt Taako. If she did, he would have been dead a long time ago. Frankly, Kravitz doesn’t know what she wants to do, but if he had to guess, he’d say she wants to help him.

So what if a lich was here? Maybe she was too slippery for him. Maybe she was too good at hiding for Kravtiz to find her. Maybe Kravitz failed to catch her. It’s less paperwork for him anyways.

God, he really hopes this doesn’t backfire.

Kravitz hands her back to Taako.

**Author's Note:**

> hey y'all how's it going!!  
> i come to you bearing this short fic inspired by a post by tumblr user bramblepatch about kravitz not recognizing that there was a lich in the umbrastaff despite being. u know. a very old emissary of the raven queen who hunts liches for a living. i looked at it and went "ohh but what if kravitz DID know about the lich in the umbrastaff and just DIDNT SAY ANYTHING" and then wrote this in one go. and then read over it 10 times. and then forgot to post it until today. and then spent half an hour trying to get my links to work in these end notes before giving up. oops  
> anyways i hope you liked this!! thanks for reading!  
> tumblr: nillial


End file.
